Netbook Linux Adventures

May 20, 2009 by Chris · 3 Comments

It has been a while since I last mentioned my little Asus Eee 701 netbook. I still use it daily and everything has generally been great. However, I’ve had a couple stability issues with it lately (due to 3rd party apps I’ve tried out) so, on a whim, decided it was time to have a look at a different operating system.

Since I had already had a look at Easy Peasy Linux with a friend’s Acer netbook, I randomly decided to try out Eeebuntu for my own. It is very easy to install from a USB stick and I was up and running on the 3.0 “Base” version in no time at all.

Initial impression? I am very impressed at how well everything worked. Network, camera, wifi, video – everything was handled with no extra efforts necessary. Definitely an awesome OS installation experience. (I had tried Eeebuntu a few months ago (earlier version) and didn’t have such great luck with drivers…)

I wasn’t quite so thrilled at the standard ‘buntu desktop on my little 7” screen though. The panels at top and bottom take up precious real estate. And, while everything seemed to work, it wasn’t very snappy.

On a whim, I installed LXDE and switched over to it (I liked LXDE last time I had a look at it). It is a fast running lightweight desktop and I have to say it really made my Eee zippy. I loved it. However, I ran into some odd glitches that I hadn’t noticed in previous LXDE experiments.

For instance, regardless of which terminal I configured it to use, the term shortcuts never worked after the first time I tried one. I had to resort to hitting the run command to then type “xterm.” My video settings are never saved between sessions either. I often use an external monitor with the Eee at my desk and I’ve have to reconfigure which monitor to use and resolution after every log in.

I was going to try out Netbook Remix next, but turns out I don’t have enough space to add all the necessary dependencies on my drive. Installing them all would run me out of space! Guess I’ll have to start over with another distro that starts with NBR and see how that works out. Easy Peasy would work for that, I reckon. Or I wonder if any distros aimed at nebooks default to LXDE?

Stay tuned…

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Tags: Easy-Peasy, eee, Eeebuntu, linux, netbook

Comments

3 Responses to “Netbook Linux Adventures”

Vox says:

May 21, 2009 at 12:02 am

Tried Intel’s yet? Moblin or whatever it’s called? It’s supposed to be quite good, actually, and the video of it looks interesting.

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- Chris says:
  
  May 21, 2009 at 1:16 pm
  
  Moblin seems like it could be cool, but (apparently) only supports the Atom based netbooks, not the dinosaurs like I have
  
  I tried #!eee (crunchbang eee) and it runs great. Openbox only so a bit “spartan” but might be interesting.
  
  Reply
Rich G. says:

May 21, 2009 at 12:35 pm

Today I updated my Aspire One and I think it may have gone from Easy Peasy to Ubuntu 9.04 Jerking Jackalope or whatever they’re up to now. I’m kind of nervous and should have read the update package a little better I suppose before I clicked “Engage!”

We’ll see how things pan out.

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